Yes, I understand that Omicron caused less severe illness individual to individual. But another series of mutations made Omicron the most transmissible virus and so it spread much faster than any variants before it. And so it was just as deadly....because a slightly weaker, yet more transmissible virus reaches many more people.
And if those people are unvaccinated, older and vaccinated...but didn't get a booster in the fall of 22 like many of us did, or just old and weak....they died in massive numbers. So, my point is that while Omicron did not make people as sick as the original strain did....it would have been just as deadly, probably more so than the original strain because it would have gone around the world in lightning speed due to it's transmissibility.
From the original strain, Alpha was 40% more likely to cause severe disease and Delta twice as much as Alpha....and both were equally as transmissible as the original strain. Just because Omicron had slightly less severe disease, it doesn't mean that the next variant won't revert back to a virus that causes disease as severe as Delta. We're 4 years in.....and a long, long way from "the sniffles".